Supernova (2000)

What can I say? I was always taught that unless I had something nice to say that I shouldn't say anything at all. Well at least the special effects can satisfy that requirement - they were excellent. But other than that, Supernova was very disappointing. It brings up (again) that age old question of: "How can they spend so much money on a film and not get a decent script out of it???" This always astounds me. As a film student at UCLA, I can never understand why there are so many terrible scripts out there. Don't the producers realise that there are a ton of students who could give them a much better script for a lot less money - heck, I'd do it for free!

There were so many opportunities for the film to be very good. The set was excellent, the effects great. But the acting and script really let it down. For some reason, every few minutes seemed to call for some kind of sex scene between various crew members. It was seriously like a kind of soft porno set in space, the sexual theme carrying right on until the very end. In fact, the closing lines of the film were sexual in nature. The music was even a little porn-like; definitely not suited to the theme of the film

I would definitely recommend waiting until this comes out on video, or even waiting until it is on TV. Although it is one of those films that is so bad it's funny. I only hope that "Pitch Black" is of a little more substance.

Fmovies: I didn't expect a great deal from this movie, but found myself enjoying it for the most part, it's no classic, far from it, but it is a decent watch. Six people on a ship get an unexpected visitor, a buff Peter Facinelli, who isn't afraid to show his muscles off.

I felt like I was watching a poor man's Event Horizon, it had some nice moments, a few scares, and some imaginative ideas. It's well acted for the most part, Angela Bassett is in a different league to the rest, I thought she was great.

The special effects were a little hit and miss, but this was made back in 2000. I wish they'd have gone further in making it a little more scary, the trouble with it, is that it's verging on melodrama, when the good premise it had, should have been sci fi horror. It lacks depth, with some explanations and concepts a little thin.

Overall though, I quite liked it.

Supernova was the beginning of the Downfall for Lou Diamond Phillips if you ask me. Anyway, the movie is about a traveling hospital rescue spaceship, that moves about the cosmos to save stranded vessels and what not. They come across a distress call, and zip off in some sort of warp travel.

After arriving there they come across a stranded miner and some strange material, that turns out to be pieces of the 5th dimension. And then the movie finally collapses under its own stupidity.

Mediocre acting, nice special effects, REALLY stupid plot, all create a nice mixture to cause minor insanity in the viewer. Some people even lose all conscious memory of having ever seen this movie, confusing it with Red Planet or some other such film.

In other words, Run!

Supernova fmovies. I saw this in the theater when it came out in 2000. at that time, the studio obviously knew it had a stink bomb on its hands, and released it without showing it to the critics first.

The plot line is that a medical ship responds to a distress call from an abandoned mining colony on a rogue moon that is about to fall into a supernova. Okay, works well enough. For some reason, the ship barely has enough working life-tubes to protect the entire crew from a hyperspace jump (which begs the question, how would they ever get patients back to where they are going.)

After killing their captain, played by veteran actor Robert Forster, the recovering drug addict pilot played by James Spader takes over. After some needless sex scenes between Spader and a perpetually angry looking Angela Bassett, and even more needless sex scenes between Robin Tunny and Lou Diamond Philips, they rescue the lone survivor of a team that was scavenging the moon. Yes, this ship has zero gravity rooms on the sides that seem to provide no other function than giving characters a place to have sex in zero gravity.

We discover that this survivor has found an alien artifact that looks like a giant sex toy, and is apparently the casing for a ninth-dimensional matter designed to destroy our universe. Meanwhile, it grants super powers to the survivor, who proceeds to go into Jason Vorhees mode and kill the rest of the crew.

Now, if you watch the deleted scenes on the DVD, you can see that the writer/director had a very different film in mind. Probably a "director's" cut would make a little more sense, but not much. It has a lot of science fiction conventions (like the life tubes and a huge ship with a small crew) that make little or no sense. It also contains clichés like a malfunctioning android and a computer with a quirky personality, which are more annoying than helpful.

The worst, of course, is the acting. One can only conclude that the actors realized fairly early on that this was going to be crap, and started phoning it in. Bassett is the worst of the lot, and I've seen her put in better performances in much cheaper movies.

Even the trailer is instructive, as it tried to almost portray the movie as a light comedy which it clearly wasn't, scoring it with music that didn't belong in the film...

Perhaps when they do the director's cut, they will explain how bad they screwed it up...

Ridiculous "loud & lazy" sci-fi thriller that makes ample use of Robin Tunney's willingness to disrobe but has little time for things like logic and characterization. The plot is that a search and rescue ship in deep space answers a distress beacon. For their trouble, they get Peter Facinelli. Oversexed, overly derivative mess of a film offers nothing you haven't seen before and better. Hell, just a few years before this was Event Horizon, with a very similar plot but a much better movie. A dark-haired and particularly buff James Spader gives the only performance worth mentioning with a straight face. How about that laugh-inducing ending? You wouldn't think a movie that has the names of both Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Hill attached to it could be this bad but it just goes to show I guess.

Supernova is legendary for is production problems and poor critical reception. However, the end result is an entertaining action sci-fi film which fails to live down to its absurdly low expectations and also fails to live up to its very high potential. in other words, it's better than most people say, and nowhere near as good as it should have been.

A rescue ship manned by several paramedics, a hot shot pilot just out of a drug rehab, and emergency personnel, patrols the frontier of human exploration, serving mining colonies, etc, far from earth's solar system. Just as we are learning the personalities in the film, and just as they are starting to become interesting, a distress call is picked up and the ship responds. Enigmatically, the distress call seems to have come from somebody out of the chief medical officer's (Angela Bassett) past, with a lot of problems. "The patient", however, is just the beginning of the mystery, as a strange object with the potential power to destroy the known universe is eventually found.

The first problem with the film is that it bites off much more than it can chew - developing compelling characters, a very interesting, detailed and original plot, excellent special effects and some great sets, but never permitting any of them to grow, expand or become fully realized. The second problem is, I suspect, the fault of studio mismanagement. Rather than contributing to the film, the cinematography and editing are so poor that they, in fact, distract and detract. The production problems - switching directors, mismanagement by the sponsoring studio, inartistic and uninspired re-shooting and re-editing - suggest a couple of simple explanations. There are so many wipes and fades in the second half of the film that I began to wonder whether they were supposed to signify something (such as the passage of time, switching of dimensions, etc) which the audience was not privy to.

Contrary to popular belief, this film had a great deal of potential, however, it would have made a much better TV mini-series or even a premise for a TV series than a cinema release. Why? Because the story and especially the characters needed a lot more time and a lot less editing to develop properly.

The story line can be seen as totally inept or quite brilliant. Though I am no fan of black-box pseudoscience explanations such as "9th dimensional matter", I prefer the 'quite brilliant' interpretation. If you think a lot about what goes on in this film, you can easily link together what seems to be a mess of loose ends and detached subplots and really 'get' what the story is meant to convey. Facinelli's character can be seen as a guardian or simply a power-addict; Spader's former drug addiction can make his attempt at heroism seem a resolution of his inner demons; his relationship with Bassett can be seen as the resolution of the entire set of problems the film poses. However, realizing all of this requires more though and energy than the film itself suggests, and depicting it so that it could have been easily deciphered by the audience would have required at least a few more hours than the film was allowed.

The acting is actually quite good. Angela Bassett is, as usual, excellent, and Peter Facinelli and Wilson Cruz are both worth watching. James Spader's often maligned performance is perfect for the character he is playing - a former drug addict on a quest for redemption. I generally do not like Spader's work very much (there are alread